Beacon Jumpstart Guide

Beacon is an embeddable widget, included in all Help Scout plans, that can be added to your website or app. With a Beacon embedded on your website, you’ll be able to provide a contact form, offer live chat, display help articles from your Docs site, help website visitors with AI, and show proactive messages anywhere your Beacon is installed.

Beacon gives you a streamlined connection from your website visitors and customers right back to your Help Scout account by just installing a few lines of code on your website. Instead of using different apps for a contact form, live chat, and self service support on your website, Beacon will take care of all of that for you. You can even install it within your mobile app using our SDKs if you would like to extend those features into your app.

AI Answers

Powered by OpenAI, this feature uses your Docs knowledge base as well as information from your own website to provide instant, accurate responses to common questions from your Beacon, freeing up valuable time for your team to handle more complex issues.

Help people right in the moment they need it the most, like having a member of your team available to answer questions 24/7 on your website. And if that isn't possible? Human help is just two clicks away.

AI answers is available to all plans to try out, and is available to all paid plans after trial.

Contact Form

If you need a contact form on your website, embedding a Beacon can take care of that for you. Capture simple information such as the customer’s name, email address, and message, and once they submit their question it will become a conversation right in your Help Scout Inbox.

Want to capture even more information about a customer before they submit their email in through Beacon's contact form? Users on our Plus and Pro plans can utilize custom fields to create a more robust contact form. Check out more about that here: Create a Smart Contact Form with Beacon

Display Help Articles

Curious about hosting your help articles within your Help Scout account? Check out Docs, Help Scout's knowledge base feature, which can be connected to your Beacon and then easily added to your website.

When connected to your Docs site, Beacon can display all of your help articles, or even just a section of articles. You can even tell Beacon which help articles to display on specific pages of your website, or put Beacon in self-service mode so that website visitors have to try to help themselves before any contact options are displayed to them.

Live Chat

If you would like to offer live chat to visitors of your website, that option can be turned on within your Beacon. With the chat option enabled, anyone on your team will be able to mark themselves as available to chat, and the chat option will then be displayed within your Beacon to anyone visiting your website.

When the last person on your team sets themselves to Unavailable, the chat option will no longer be visible within the Beacon to your site visitors, and only the email contact option will be displayed. With that, you can set the right expectations with your site visitors, and they will not be able to start a live chat only to be sent straight to email when no human is available.

Proactive Messages

If you have ever wanted to display proactive pop-up messages on your website, you can do that with a Beacon installed. Choose between options like a message that pops up out of your Beacon on the bottom of your site, a banner message, a modal, a survey, or even NPS®.

Messages can be used from anything to offering more self-service support on your website, all the way to interacting with your site visitors more deeply by proactively inviting them to chat or email you.

Pro Tip: Want to give access to Messages to someone on your sales, marketing or success teams? Add them to your Help Scout account as a light user and they will have full access to create Messages for your website free of charge! Light users are available on our Plus and Pro plans.

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.